Secret Statecraft in the Venezuelan Affair

The shady side of Operation Absolute Resolve

This post continues writing about Venezuela in order to figure out what I think about it. Previously I discussed some strategic ironies of low-cost operations in whatever just happened (war? raid? decapitation? coup? kidnapping? adventure? quagmire? Sicilian expedition? cosplay?). Given the abrupt abduction of Maduro by godlike military aliens, perhaps we should call it Operation American Rapture, or simply El Asunto Venezolano. Part the second now takes up the role of secret statecraft in Operation Absolute Resolve (yes, I still hate that name). Since I recently wrote a book on secret statecraft, this has been on my mind a lot.

Aside: Memory Lane

But the other thing that has been on my mind is a trip to Venezuela by a baby naval intelligence officer in 2001. I was with a Naval Special Warfare unit under Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH) at the time. Among things we conducted mil-to-mil training for Latin American special operations forces (SOF). Chavez had only been in power for two years, and the United States still maintained normal diplomatic relations with Venezuela. So-called “foreign internal defense” missions were part of the standard soft power package for the region, intentionally overt but discreet efforts to cultivate partner nation capacity and military professionalism. Our unit was in the process of developing relationships with Venezuelan SOF units, but it turned out to be one of the last such visits before relations with Chavez soured.

So here is a photo of young LT Lindsay on a patrol boat somewhere on the Orinoco. My eyes are closed in this photo, which seems like an appropriate representation of American awareness of things to come, or obliviousness to strategic wisdom, or blindness to human costs. The digital camera I was carrying around had pretty terrible resolution, too, so it probably wasn’t necessary to black out the faces of my Venezuelan comrades, but, privacy, facial recognition, etc. I really don’t remember much about those other gentlemen in the boat. I’m sure I wrote a report about them. Now I wonder where they ended up, and whether any of them stayed in the Venezuelan military. Did either of them participate in the (not very vigorous) defense of Venezuelan homeland twenty-five years later? And if so, why was their defense so lackluster? Did some older and more farsighted version of this baby intel officer offer them inducements to sit it out? I wish I could ask them. Or, perhaps they never got a chance, having been purged at some point as Chavez, and then Maduro, became increasingly paranoid about internal security. I have no idea about these things. But it is interesting to think about the long history of US SOF in Venezuela, sometimes training the Venezuelan military, and sometimes bagging the Venezuelan president.

So much secret statecraft

Back to secret statecraft today, there is a lot to think about with this operation. As with any discussion of initial reports on current events, there is a lot we don’t know, and a lot of what we do know is likely to be mistaken or exaggerated, so take everything with a Caribbean Sea worth of salt. This is doubly true of events in the covert or clandestine realm which are intended to remain secret, until they aren’t. Indeed, the sometimes accidental or unavoidable and sometimes deliberate disclosure of secrecy is often an important part of the story, as it is here. Here is a non-exhaustive list of ways in which secrecy might be relevant in El Asunto Venezolano (as reported in the New York Times or speculated elsewhere):

· CIA intelligence gathering months or years in advance

· Extensive reconnaissance and technical collection

· Highly placed human source(s) reporting on Maduro’s habits and whereabouts

· Extensive rehearsals by Delta Force using a mockup of the target facility

· Strict secrecy to protect elaborate military plans and timelines

· CIA drone strikes (not so covert action) to shape or signal, something somehow

· Sensitive cyber operations targeting the electrical grid and communication systems

· Jamming, spoofing, and electronic deception measures

· Stealth aircraft flying under the cover of darkness

· Perhaps other special technical measures by land, sea, air, and space

· Perhaps infiltration of Maduro’s Cuban protection detail

· Perhaps CIA collusion with successors in the Venezuelan regime (i.e., coupcraft)

· Perhaps influence operations to discourage Venezuelan resistance

· Perhaps a secret deal with Russia to abandon Venezuela or withhold support

· Perhaps secret diplomacy with other countries to enable or stand back

· Perhaps misleading US lawmakers and others about goals and authorities

· Perhaps dissembling to the public, the media, and allies about many things

· Reactions and counteractions by Venezuelan counterintelligence services

· Reactions and counteractions by other geopolitical actors (China, Cuba, Russia)

And so on. There’s a lot of “perhaps” in this list—thinking about deception is always flirting with conspiracy theory—but you get the idea. Operation Absolute Resolve (I still hate that name) and the broader strategic effort was enabled by a lot of secret plans, secret capabilities, and secret activities. Describing all of this in any detail would require a much longer post and would inevitably get a lot wrong since so much remains unknown. Nevertheless, we can at least surmise that the dramatic raid revealed to the world on Saturday morning was just the tip of the iceberg of a lot of gray and black activity taking place well before, and probably long after.

First off, why does it make sense to talk about all this activity together? In Age of Deception I define secret statecraft as organized deception for strategic advantage. The main types of secret statecraft are espionage (intelligence collection), sabotage (covert action to break things), subversion (covert action to influence people), and counterintelligence (using any of the above to defend against any of the above). The reason I use the term “secret statecraft” instead of just “intelligence” is to sidestep a lot of annoying policy debates about the institutional boundaries between intelligence collection, covert action, cyber operations, information operations, special operations, sensitive law enforcement operations, secret diplomacy, and so on. These things are different in many ways and may be conducted by very different types of organizations or deception specialists (e.g., state spy agencies, police counterintelligence units, military SOF, commercial threat intel firms, etc.), but they all have a certain family resemblance. All of them use deception—simulating things that aren’t there and dissimulating things that are—to advance a political agenda.

You keep using that word

I keep saying “secret statecraft” but will be talking about wartime operational intel a lot here, and that may be irritating to some. In my opinion, military (or air or naval) intelligence is essentially the employment of secret statecraft at the operational level to support or enable military forces. As discussed, the concept of organized deception is agnostic to institutional identity.

Secret statecraft can of course be used in peace as well as war, and everywhere in between. You can imagine a spectrum from pure espionage with no kinetic activity to pure combat with little actionable intelligence. CIA efforts to prep the battlespace and perhaps to conduct secret diplomacy to prepare a coup would be far on one end of the spectrum, with tactical cyber and electronic warfare to suppress air defenses on the other.

The so-called revolution in military affairs is all about improving information and coordination, with growing reliance on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. To the extent that the network-centric RMA is revolutionary (and I question this), it is because operational intelligence and deception capabilities make it possible to do more with less. The RMA is really about the increasing scope and scale of secret statecraft used in support of military operations. SOF counterterrorism operations have honed this to a high degree, discussed below, and the flourishing of cyber operations is part of the same general historical development.

Improving efficiency

Efficiency is the central value proposition of secret statecraft. Efficiency means doing more with less. Partly this is the old story about substituting information with mass. When you have better information, you can operate more quickly and precisely. Likewise, when you can confuse or sabotage the other side, then you can do what you want with fewer forces or effort. What makes deception especially useful for deception, however, is that the other side does some of the work. Deception turns the other guy’s assumptions and institutional resources into liabilities. Organized deception can thus help to improve efficiency by making your side smarter or the other side dumber.

The efficiency aspect of Operation Absolute Resolve is obvious. The U.S. military relied on a lot of intelligence, deception, and precision to conduct a major regime change (that was not really a regime change). The location of Maduro was known precisely, and his defenses were quickly disarmed or (likely) persuaded to stand down. Instead of a giant, costly, bloody, uncertain invasion, this was accomplished with 150 aircraft and a lot of supporting capabilities in only two and half hours, with no U.S. fatalities or major equipment losses and apparently only minor injuries. That’s efficient.

Use it and lose it

The flipside of efficiency is fragility. If doing more with less relies on secrecy, then keeping those secrets is essential. Otherwise you just have less. Sensitive plans and capabilities must be concealed if they will be counteracted when revealed. The US military and intelligence community had to keep a lot of secrets in order for Absolute Resolve to go off so well. Humint sources, cyber exploits, various technical capabilities, and operational plans provided a relative information advantage Secrecy set the conditions for a successful efficiency operation.

But secrecy is also a constraint. Secret capabilities cannot be communicated. When Maduro was given a last chance to leave, there was no way to tell him how perilous his situation really was. That would have risked revealing the key CIA source(s) in his inner circle. (And by the way, for all the talk about cyber magic, isn’t it interesting that the key intelligence asset is good old human espionage?) Thus, Maduro could suppose that Trump was bluffing or that he would be able to ride out an attack, ignorant of the true balance of capabilities and costs.

The conceal-reveal problem is a big reason why cyber is not useful for coercion, even as it may be a useful complement for operations. If policymakers are tempted to employ low-cost secret capabilities more often (because they are low cost), they are also unable to simply threaten to use them (because they are secret), which means that efficiency operations are not necessarily a useful arrow in the quiver of coercive diplomacy.

Obviously, the cat is out of the bag once the surprise raid is under way. This puts an imperative on speed and violence to exploit the window of opportunity that surprise creates. Yet the same capabilities that create surprise may not be as useful for future operations for the same reasons. There are reports that Venezuelan security services are on the hunt for spies, and it would be surprising if they weren’t. You can be sure that Colombian and Cuban spy hunters are working harder this week as well. When technical backdoors can be closed, defenses realigned and strengthened, and counterintelligence services put on alert to specific threats, then the efficiency advantages of secrecy become diminished.

An inside job

A key argument of the book is that secret statecraft relies on vulnerable institutions. The irony of secret statecraft is that overt cooperation is what enables covert conflict. The basic idea is that intelligence operations require a permissive environment. Institutions with lots of connectivity provide access to intelligence threats, and weak monitoring and enforcement functions make it hard to detect or eject them. It is easiest to get the efficiency advantages of secret statecraft when you can leverage the shared institutions of the target, letting them do some of the work. All deception, to some extent, is an inside job.

Venezuela appears to have been a rather permissive environment. I say this because the relative lack of military resistance is truly surprising. The abysmal failure of the Venezuelan Integral Airspace Defense Command (CODAI) to draw blood is something that needs to be explained. It has/had some formidable capabilities (according to IISS Military Balance data), including perhaps 8 batteries of S-300VM (SA-23) and many older SA-3 sites, a half dozen mobile Buk-M2E (SA-17) systems and mobile short-range SA-22, and a ton of SA-24 MANPADS (man-portable air defense system), as well a handful of Su-30 and F-16 interceptors and an integrated sensor network, including the long range JY-22 designed to detect stealth aircraft.

Maybe US SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) was extremely effective in neutralizing all of these threats. F-22s took out the air threat while F-35s and EA-18Gs jammed and AARGMed the radars. Trump also hinted at some spooky electronic warfare or cyber capability that turned off the lights (even though there seem to be lots of lights on in Venezuelan cell phone video), and presumably CYBERCOM helped shut down other systems (although I would be very careful to overattributing effects to cyber that might also be the result of EW or other measures).

But if you’ve ever been to Caracas you know that the terrain is really mountainous and covered with dense jungle. Venezuela is also just a big place, even for 150 aircraft to cover. This geography offers lots of places to hide and ways to employ air defenses even in a dense SEAD environment, especially with all the strategic warning provided by the US buildup. You can find media reports of the destruction of some high-end systems, but this only accounts for a fraction of the CODAI order of battle. I suspect that many systems were and remain viable.

And then there are all the MANPADS and AAA all over the place. Remember that the main supported mission was the 160^th SOAR Blackhawks with the Delta team. If you can see these well enough to get cell phone video, you can see them long enough to fire volleys of MANPADS. Two and a half hours over the target is just a really long time. It seems that some of the Blackhawks sustained some damage, but it’s almost miraculous that we didn’t lose any. I am not casting any shade on the operational aspects, and on the contrary I am very impressed by what appears to be a meticulously planned multidomain effort, but I am still surprised by the results.

The US military is incredibly skilled at this sort of thing, and CODAI operators may be less so, but I’m not convinced that operational excellence sufficiently explains the extremely lopsided outcome. This is why I think an inside job is plausible. We just don’t have a lot of information about what that looks like, but it seems possible that some commanders were persuaded not to fight. One possibility is that the CIA made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, either the carrot of running the successor regime or the stick of getting the Maduro treatment. I have many, many questions about the extent of prior coordination with Vice President Rodriguez and other regime elements. This would mean that the US decapitation would also be a CIA-enabled coup.

While I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, we might as well consider another possibility that the Russians got involved. Maybe the Russians withdrew technical support, or at least they didn’t offer any active support to a US operation they certainly might have seen coming. It’s sort of weird that Russia helped Venezuela build up a fairly decent IADS only to watch it get shredded with hardly a complaint (a few proforma condemnations of American lawlessness). At the risk of indulging conspiracy theory, maybe the Russians offered inducements to Venezuelan forces for standing aside after receiving inducement from the Trump admin for doing so. This is pure speculation, of course, prompted by Fiona Hill’s 2019 testimony that the Russians proposed some sort of Venezuela for Ukraine deal: you sell out your proxy and I’ll sell out mine.

Cyber warfare is boring

Cyber may be efficient, but this does not necessarily mean that it is highly effective in any dramatic way. Age of Deception is skeptical about the “cyberwar” narrative that cyberspace creates independent tools for causing massive disruption or other strategic effects. It contributes to the alternative perspective that cyber operations are either a new way of conducting intelligence or a useful supporting enabler for military operations. This is, cyber is a complement not a substitute for war.

The admittedly very sketchy reports of cyber in Absolute Resolve are entirely consistent with this emerging perspective. Cyber might have been used to turn off the lights (although it seems like the city lights are still on in videos from Venezuela and electronic warfare might have provided a simpler and more reliable way of doing the same things). Cyber might also have been used to turn off or confuse radars or Venezuelan communications. These are supporting activities that improve efficiency by creating an operational window for friendly forces. When the defenses are down, you don’t need as many forces to fly through them. This is entirely consistent with the way in which Israel allegedly used cyber in 2007 to degrade Syrian radars during an IAF air raid.

Such cyber capabilities are nice to have as enablers that marginally improve efficiency and provide a temporary relative advantage. They might be especially desirable if there is a need to only temporarily and reversibly degrade capability. But they are not a silver bullet. Commanders may even be reticent to rely on spooky cyber enablers when more effective if less efficient means are available (i.e., bombing radars). Getting cyber to work well as a complement requires a firm institutional and doctrinal foundation to control the ubiquitous complexities and uncertainties inherent in remote software operations. CYBERCOM has been working hard to provide this institutional foundation for a decade and a half, and perhaps Absolute Resolve is a milestone of progress. We won’t know for a while.

Efforts to institutionalize cyber into US military operations have in effect made cyber boring. I mean this as a complement. Cyber is boring in the same way as air refueling, electronic warfare, and combat search and rescue are boring. It is now a standard and expected part of any modern US military operation. The surprise is no longer that cyber is used (or that its use tends to be exaggerated in media reports). It would be more surprising if cyber was absent. By the same token, cyber is now just an institutionalized part of the military machine, not a strategic substitute for it. And let me say again, the key intelligence asset in this entire affair, the thing that made it possible to capture Maduro with relatively little resistance, was human espionage. Human sources remain vital in a cybered up world.

“Cyberspace” is an irritating yet unavoidable term for gesturing toward the ubiquity of technical devices and networks in every area of modern life. This is arguably making secret statecraft more prevalent because tech provides so many new avenues for collecting and manipulating information. More specifically, because information systems improve the efficiency of economic activity, they can be hijacked by secret statecraft to improve the efficiency of politics and warfare.

Yet while the tradecraft of the spy business is novel (and more businesslike) the nature of secret statecraft is older than Sun Tzu. Whether organized deception is employed by civilian agencies or military organizations or criminal hackers, we can describe some common strategic advantages and common strategic constraints. As an international relations scholar interested in the strategic essence of things, I needed a covering term for the shadow realm of politics, no matter the specific actors and instruments involved. I also needed a way to talk about the political purpose of cybersecurity without tying concepts to particular technologies that tend to change quickly. Thus, secret statecraft.

Jackpot!

I wrote Age of Deception to make sense of cybersecurity, but a nice thing about secret statecraft (which I argue is the strategic essence of cybersecurity) is that it can be used to discuss things other than cybersecurity. This includes special operations, which also rely on a lot of stealth, secrecy, and deception. Like cyber nerds, SOF also operate in the gray zone of authorities between the military and intelligence community (and law enforcement). Unlike cyber, however, SOF are still military forces with guns and bombs. They are shifted further toward the pure military side of the spectrum, but still highly dependent on secret statecraft. I wrote about SOF a little bit in Information Technology and Military Power.

If cyber was just a nice-to-have efficiency improver in Absolute Resolve, the same cannot be said of SOF. Indeed, the Delta Force team was the main effort. It’s hard to overstate how remarkable this is given the scale of the operation. The entire operation was essentially a SOF raid to bag a high value target (HVT), with a much more extensive enabling force than most other HVT raids. While SOF traditionally are a supporting enabler for military operations, in this case we have a major military operation enabling a SOF raid. It seems that the red-headed step-child has grown up to become king.

A key point here is that the Maduro raid was built on two decades of SOF learning and institution building to figure out how to find, fix, and finish HVTs. US SOF—specifically JSOC and special mission units like Delta Force, the 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and SEAL Team Six—have developed extensive doctrine and capabilities throughout decades of the War on Terror for conducting these kinds of operations, resulting in literally thousands of individuals killed or captured. The end result is a particular style of network centric warfare that integrates extensive in intelligence preparation with highly precise military operations.

This institutional element of success in the Maduro operation is based on years of hard effort, and many mistakes and painful lessons learned. (Military lessons are written in blood.) Another way to put this is that the efficiency advantages of secret statecraft are not really that cheap, ironically enough. If you really want to have effective intelligence performance, I argue in the book, then you need to have an effective clandestine organization as an enabling platform. The SOF counternetwork machine, supported by CIA infrastructure and the entire conventional military planning process, provides one such platform, tuned for a particular purpose that happened to be very useful in this case.

What do I even know?

This post is much longer than I intended, so I am going to pause for now. This is really just my open notebook of emerging thoughts rather than any sort of careful analysis. In lieu of a conclusion, I will just say that Operation American Rapture, er Absolute Resolve, exemplifies a lot of the dynamics of secret statecraft that I discuss in the book. It exemplifies both the efficiency advantages of combining institutional subversion (i.e., intelligence and deception) with military power, and it exemplifies the strategic constraints and ironies that come with over relying on those advantages.

I also want to flag that there may be some significant deception involved with the Trump administration’s communication about this whole affair with Congress and the American people. I have been musing here mainly about deception in the means of statecraft, but deception about its ends may be even more relevant. But that is a story for another time.